An amazing look back at Java's early days , by Chuck McManis on HN: Tcl was the 'language to beat' amongst the new language prod...

Raoul Duke : As soon as somebody brings in a reference to xah lee, somebody else has to call somebody a Nazi, and then somebody else has to ...

Schemers use the word "syntax" to mean at least two (and maybe even three) different things: in DEFINE-SYNTAX and LET-SYNTAX, synt...

On the occasion of Gosling joining Google, it's Java diss time again. But most Java criticism doesn't take its raison d'être int...

Given that software is so utterly confusing, it's often helpful to bring in metaphors from other areas, Christianity in this case: The H...

Nothing gets LtU's juices flowing like a good old OOP discussion. It starts with a harmless "OO is anti-modular? Really?" a...

Kent Pitman : I certainly sat in lots of Scheme design meetings where I pushed for obvious things like branch cuts, error handling, and othe...

My critically acclaimed Understanding Hygiene (part 1) contains the absolute baseline necessary for understanding hygienic macros. This pos...

A comment by Sean McDirmid on LtU is spinning off into a nice PL design discussion: We should only critique designs like we critique art, I...

Chris Double is again exploring ATS , a language with a very advanced type system: ATS did save me from some errors in my larger program tha...

This is CPython, the standard Python implementation, compiled from C to JavaScript using Emscripten, running in your browser (without any p...

Harrison Ainsworth's Wittgenstein for programmers is an awesome project. And very quotable: Where a proposition describes the world, a ...

Programs really aren't plain text. Or they shouldn't be. But until now there was no way out. OSes come with Ed, and Ed is the stand...

Vladimir Sedach just tweeted something dear to my heart: Arguing that the #GPL is restricting your freedom is exactly the same as arguing t...

I remember reading an article about RMS some time ago, where he says that a module system/namespace management for Emacs Lisp is not somethi...

Plain awesome! ( cached copy in case the original site goes down)

I've blogged about this before, but I think it's worth stressing again: Programming languages should not be viewed as media , but a...

It's hard to keep source code "beautiful". I think the only way it can work is to be dedicated like Zen monks cleaning their m...

Ian Lance Taylor, the author of the gold linker and the GCC version of the Go language, has written a nice mini-series on how to unwind the ...

Lisp is the worst programming language, except all the others that have been tried.

Some years ago I was in a state that I now discover in many other people on the web, and which I term "PL anxiety". It is characte...

I often like to make snide remarks at Python and Ruby, because ... well, because they're not Lisp. To offset this a bit I'd like to ...

2013 Update: I was young and stupid when I wrote this. I fear that Haskell is doomed to succeed. — Tony Hoare I ♥ Lisp. I think it...